Email: it’s a nightmare when it comes to keeping it organized. With mail coming in at any time of the day in potentially massive quantities every week, it can seem too tedious to keep organized. Unlike snail mail, it doesn’t cost anything to send and doesn’t take up physical space so there’s little incentive to send less and toss things out.

Over time, the excessive amount of useless emails can bury those important ones from your credit card, family, friends and other things that you actually want to read. Tidying up an inbox (or multiple inboxes) doesn’t have to be long and complicated. Over time it will also save you time and make you feel better when open login since you don’t have 500+ unopened messages.

The first step is to reduce the number of emails that are coming in. If you have an overflowing sink, you don’t just start mopping up the floor while the faucet is still on. You turn the faucet off first and then mop up the floor. The same concept can be applied to an email. There is no point in deleting messages that you are still receiving from a business or organization that you no longer want to hear from.

You should first click on the “unsubscribe” or “change subscription preferences” link at the bottom of the message. If you do not hear from them from here-on-out, then you should click unsubscribe from all emails. If it’s a place that you only visit a few times a year, then you may consider selecting the once a month option or only for specific topics rather than everything. If there is no unsubscribe link them, click on the “report spam” or “mark as SPAM” button next to the delete button; it will send any further messages to your spam box.

The next step is to delete “expired” messages. These include sales and events that have already ended and newsletters that are more than a few months old. In the same way you would throw out expired coupons and catalogs or flyers for events that already passed, expired messages are equally as useless. If you haven’t done so already, you should have a separate email address for only your work or professional messages.

After that, it’s time to create some folders (or labels in Gmail). On the left-hand column, click on “Create new label” or “New Folder,” type in an easy-to-identify name, and click create. With folders, you can also filter messages from specific email addresses. The filter will add send the message(s) from that address directly into a folder when it comes in, bypassing the inbox.

For Gmail, see: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en.

For Yahoo, see: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN15994.html.

For Outlook, see: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/manage-em...

If you have another type of email, just search how to create a filter for ____ mail.

The last step is to set a daily goal for how many useless messages you want to sort through and delete. Especially if you have 1000+ messages in your inbox, it’s not really feasible to try to go through them all in one sitting. Instead, you should try to set a goal as to which date you want to sort until. For example, maybe today you go through all the emails you received in the last two to three weeks, tomorrow go through the ones from a month ago and so on. You could also set a numerical goal, but make sure you record the date received that you stopped at.